This is THE fastest, lightest weight social share button plugin available – especially if you tweak a couple of settings.
See how to make it as fast as possible on your site while still looking great.
Why It’s the Best for Speed and Function
The Scriptless Social Sharing plugin is the ONLY plugin that offers a way to achieve:
- zero added CSS and JS requests
- zero added page weight
- zero deduction in Google PageSpeed Insights (GPSI) score
- assignable custom Pinterest image
And it’s free!!
No other free or paid share button plugin can lay claim to all that.
Select Your Buttons And Where They Appear
For this tutorial, I selected and rearranged the buttons shown to be the most common I believe y’all will be using.
I also placed them above and below the content, and removed the Heading that says “Share this post” too.
A typical Genesis child theme was used for all snapshots of how the buttons appear.
Shown below are those selections in the Button Settings area.
NOTE: Scroll to the bottom of the settings page and save your settings after you make changes.
You may also need to purge cache and/or use an incognito window to see the changes, depending on how you have caching set up on your site and browser. You may also have luck either previewing a post (instead of actual View post) or just viewing a different post.
See this tutorial for how to Delete Cache Everywhere.
About the Default Settings
The default settings load:
- a CSS file so that each button has the proper color for its platform
- Font Awesome for the social platform icons. Font Awesome can also be used for the text font on the buttons.
All of these things make the buttons look nice, but they can also impact your page load speed.
Why Use Custom Settings?
Font Awesome has super looking icons, and lots of them.
However, they have to be brought in from the outside world. Plus, the entire and extensive library has to be brought in, not just the icons you are using.
All of that translates into:
- more requests (number of items it takes to display your page)
- heavier page weight (how many bytes each item is)
- a request outside of your site that cannot be cached
And all of that means one thing – slower page loads.
Fortunately, Scriptless Social Sharing gives you several ways to speed things up.
Settings for Ultimate Speed
If you want max speed and a perfect GPSI score, then just uncheck all 3 boxes in Plugin Styles.
That way the CSS file and Font Awesome won’t load.
The buttons will look something like this (if your theme has a button style)
As you can see, the share buttons:
- have no icons
- have no individual social platform colors
- took on the default button color of the theme
Settings for Looks and Speed
The above look is not too bad, and perhaps you want all the buttons to be the same color to match your branding.
But I like the social platform colors and slimmer buttons.
Scriptless Social Sharing can do that!!
In Plugin Styles:
- check the first box for Load the main stylesheet
- set Button Padding to 4
To get the text to display on mobile:
- add the following to your theme’s CSS file (style.css)
OR
- in Additional CSS, but only if you are already using that through the Customizer.
Do one or the other, not both.
Big thank you to Marcy Diaz of Amethyst Website Design for the CSS styling!!!
/* Scriptless Social Sharing
—————————————– */
.scriptlesssocialsharing span.sss-name {
position: relative !important;
font-size: 16px;
}
@media only screen and (max-width: 600px) {
.scriptlesssocialsharing span.sss-name {
font-size: 12px;
}
.scriptlesssocialsharing-buttons {
display: block !important;
}
.scriptlesssocialsharing .scriptlesssocialsharing-buttons a.button {
display: inline-block !important;
min-width: 33.33333333%;
}
}
Now your buttons will look like this:
This is the same look I have on BlogAid.
Yes, it does add a request for the CSS file, and a wee bit of weight (24 KB, which is the tiniest of all the plugins).
But, that one file is local, meaning on your site. And it can be cached with both a local caching plugin and the visitor’s browser. So in the end, it adds nothing.
And you still get a perfect score on GPSI, even when there is no caching help.
You can’t beat that!!!
Assign a Pinterest Image and Turn Off Buttons
Another sweet feature Scriptless Social Sharing offers is a way to assign a custom Pinterest image from the images embedded in the content to the Pinterest share button.
You can’t even find something like this in ANY other free share button plugin.
(Note: if no Pinterest image is assigned, the Featured Image will be used.)
And, the plugin allows you to turn off share buttons on a per post basis too.
You’ll find both settings in the admin sidebar module, as shown below.
But I Want My Icons!
Okay!
Instead of using Font Awesome, you might be able to use DashIcons, which have been natively supported in the WordPress core since version 3.8.
Or, you might be able to use a custom set of icons that you store on your site.
These also could be used for your social follow buttons.
But, both will take a designer to install and configure for you.
What About Share Counts?
Nope! That’s the one thing that Scriptless Social Sharing doesn’t do – and for good reason!
Everything about showing share counts slows down your site.
Not to mention how inaccurate they are because so many of the social platforms no longer provide real data anymore.
And it’s no longer true that showing counts increases shares. That’s so 2016!!
Wrap Up
I think Scriptless Social Sharing is the perfect free plugin for most bloggers.
That’s why I use it on BlogAid.
With easy tweaks to the settings, it’s by far the fastest and lightest social share button plugin available.
And it’s the only free one that provides extra Pinterest features.
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Wow Thank you so much MaAnna!! What a simple change that makes a difference!!! I really don’t even notice that much of a change in my buttons either. I actually like the slimmer look better too:). Thanks!!
Super, Kathleen!!! And that’s why tests like this are so important. Fashion can cost. Function and speed have to be looked at too.
Oh My! thank you, thank you for this post and plugin. I wish I had found it before I paid for Tasty pins because I wanted to be able to select a specific Pinterest image. But I don’t care because I love how the buttons look and that I can pick a specific Pinterest image and that the Pint button doesn’t show on any other images.
Again, thank you so much.
You still need Tasty Pins, Lise. It’s the best way to separate your SEO meta description form the longer, keyword stuffed, and hashtag overload that Pinterest needs.
Thanks again MaAnna for your research and expertise. I made the switch to Scriptless Social Sharing. The only thing that looks different is the font color on my buttons is gray, rather than white, so the words are a little hard to read. I suppose it has to do with my theme. Any suggestions?
It may be inheriting a font from your theme. Would need a designer to look at the whole CSS for the order of things.
I cut a whole second off my site speed! You are royalty! Thank you so much!
Thrilled to hear it!!!! That’s a sweet little plugin for sure, and getting better.